George Osborne’s Credit Card Budget

George Osborne maxed out his political credit card today with a benefits bonanza for bosses and a middle class housing hand-out all to be paid for by unspecified cuts in 2015.

A range of measures, including corporation tax cuts (Osborne’s dad will be pleased) and Fannie Mae style mortgages for people wanting to upgrade to £600,000 mansions, will no doubt buy Osborne a few headlines. But he will pay in 2015 when yet more savage cuts – including no doubt more social security slashing – plunge even more people into desperate poverty.

Of course when it comes to public sector workers (currently on strike today – solidarity and all that you benefit sanctioning bastards), Osborne couldn’t wait to wield the axe. Low paid public sector workers will now face a triple whammy of extended wage freezes along with the already announced real term cuts to tax credits and housing benefit.

For those workers, and the millions other who are set to see in work benefits raided on a yearly basis, the raising of the personal allowance will be of little comfort.

Osborne ploughed ahead with his plans to create mass homelessness by extending the Right To Buy scheme, meaning less homes for those with least. Still not to worry now that Jemima and Tarquin can upgrade their property investment using a government sponsored loan instead of dipping into the latte-slurping fund.

And for the rest of us, all we got was a trivial cut in the price of beer that the breweries probably won’t bother to pass on. Let them get pissed is Osborne’s response to the crisis. And obviously this cut only applies to beer, not wine or spirits, because beer’s what the plebs drink. A more transparent attempt to neutralise last year’s pasty tax shambles would be hard to imagine.

Once again there is nothing in this budget for the very poorest. The bosses on the other hand will be laughing all the way to the bank.

81 responses to “George Osborne’s Credit Card Budget”

So much for the “Aspiration Nation”, I aspire to stay alive each day. If I manage to have a meal I’m doing well. As for a penny off a pint, makes no difference to me, I can’t even remember the last time I was in a pub. Petrol prices make no difference to me either, as owning & running a vehicle is something I can only dream of, and I can’t even afford bus fares, but have to walk everywhere instead. Fuck you Osborne , you Upper Class Twat of the Year. Just Fuck You.

From Sky News online:
‘The independent Office for Budget Responsibility does expect Britain to avoid a triple-dip recession but public borrowing will be higher because of the floundering recovery.

It is now forecast to hit £114bn this year instead of £108bn before eventually falling to £42bn in 2017/18.

Driving home the problems facing Britain, figures released hours before the Budget showed the first rise in unemployment for a year – up 7,000 to 2.52m.

But despite growing calls to change course from his austerity regime, Mr Osborne insisted there could be no turning back.’

2018.. In 2010 the Foundation for European Progresive Studies found that the earliest recovery would be 2020. It’s 2013 now, we can’t allow the State to lead us to slaughter. I’m going to try to save my Son. I can’t do it alone.

Don’t get too exited. The winemakers say that the “penny off a pint” is illegal under EU competitions laws and so can’t be implemented in the UK. Good old George. The guy doesn’t know whether his areshole is bored or punched.

‘The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) now predicts growth of 2.3% for 2015, 2.7% in 2016 and 2.8% in 2017.

Figures also show that the deficit has fallen from 11.2% of GDP in 2009/10 to 7.4% this year and is set to continue dropping until it reaches 2.2% in 2017/18.
George Osborne with his red box A Twitpic shows George Osborne at work

But public sector net debt will rise from 75.9% of GDP this year to 79.2, 82.6, 85.1 and then 85.6% in the following years before falling to 84.8% in 2017/18.’

Let’s talk £’s. Not %. 100% = HOW MANY POUNDS (and £’s of what? dust? dirt? air? water? you get where I’m going with this..)

JV, your feelings towards JCP workers seems slightly ambivalent. Are they forced to raise sanction doubts for fear of losing their jobs, or do they do so of their own free will and thus deserve the hatred of many claimants?

Judging from my limited experience, some of the workers (well actually, come to think of it, just the one worker really) are very strict and seem eager to find any reason for sanctions, whilst others are totally the opposite and sympathetic enough to give some leeway. As far as I’m concerned, this shows there is at least some room for free will and the former are well deserved of any hatred.

I agree. In my time at the job centre I encountered two truly vile people. they made my life hell and I was at the end of my tether. They chose to be that way. They chose to open the book and go it, even when they don’t need to and shouldn’t. They go above and beyond to put difficulty in your way. Everyone else was pretty normal, some quite annoying but not obnoxious and a couple rather nice and even helpful. Some people go out of their way to make things as difficult as they can and yes some do the opposite and smooth your pathway as much as possible.

Well apparently for every 1 job cut from the public sector, 6 more miraculously sprout up in the private sector. So I would take that as a sign of intent as opposed to a passing observation.
Clearly the plan is to reduce Government spending, apart from their own pay of course, and no doubt this will translate into sanctions down the line.
Sanctions that will themselves, probably translate into a person “coming off benefit”, as if it were a mark of well-thought out strategy.

Problem is though that many of the jobs which do crop up are ludicrous non-earners like four hours here and seven hours there and ten hours somewhere else – if we’re really lucky. That’s not great pay potential at NMW, but ‘it’s a job’, so one less on the claimants list. Who though if they live alone, can survive on the £50-60 pay which 10 hours earns after NI deductions. The fact is that this wouldn’t support a nest of blue tits so the tax payer foots the bill once more. The low payed worker is shifted on to a general list of benefit recipients which is far more anonymous and much less controversial and scrutinised than JSA claimant figures.
Result:-Con Dem 1 – 0 Taxpayer

Well, the government aren’t actually too bothered about a person ‘comes off benefits’ and don’t gather data to that end. They may be concerned about the various lengths of the gap between claims, but they are not concerned how it comes about.
For example, in government statistics, there is no difference between you getting a job and dying, taking up study, retiring, changing to a different benefit, leaving the country, being sanctioned, signing off without explanation etc.

I’ve looked at a lot of crap jobs lately, mostly because I absolutely LOATHE the Work Programme. My new advisor has no redeeming features and worse, his desk is so close to another advisor, she often butts in and chats along so it’s like I have two advisors giving me specious crap in stereo.
But you are right, there is a massive trend towards a standard of part time work that starts at zero hours and barely reaches 16, and while it would eliminate as big a reliance on the state (in some cases), it doesn’t improve the quality of life.
So when you consider Osbourne’s budget speech on ‘aspiration’, they should surely be monitoring the suitability of the labour market to the unemployed, because aspiration does not override the impossibility of performance being imposed by the current labour market.

Did we expect anything different? The slimebag scum-suckers as usual look after themselves and their ilk and chuck a few crumbs in the middle ground and sod the rest. I am cold. My husband is cold.
I phoned up to ask how much for a 13kg refill for my mobile gas heaters (husband disabled and to all intents and purposes is bedridden) they said £32.00 – I asked what for a damn refill? If you buy a bottle with the calor in it ( where I live) it costs sixty seven quid for chrissake.

That’ll be it. News reports don’t seem able to ask ‘why?’ but reading the contradictory statements side-by-side, some news readers’ voices have started to contain barely-there – but still, traces of an unspoken question/doubts. They quite often sound/look uncomfortable listening to ‘the line’ being said to them/us so insistently (and in ‘doublespeak’) but they’re too professional to raise questions. Sometimes they look/sound as though it is more-than-usually difficult to continue to politely feign respect/pretend nothing untoward is being said/done, when clearly – it is.

They can’t say what’s going through their minds – (“Did you really just say that? “Do you not expect people to read between the lines of what you are saying?”) Although so many people now know that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes – still, news-people are obliged to continue pretending it’s ‘business as usual’/everything is reasonable (or abandon their remit). It’s sounding/looking, at times, harder than before for some presenters to remain/appear deferential and ‘on message’, when faced with what are clearly madmen (and women) insisting that black is white . There’s been a feeling of near-embarrassment several times recently, when they have wondered what on earth viewers/listeners must be thinking (or, to some extent – they know).

All making little, to no difference in the grand scheming of things, but just a subtle shift in perception/reaction is …. better than nothing (?). Then again, what could realistically come from it? Maybe the interviewers just have summer colds leading them to sound a bit uneasy/uncertain

I know they won’t suddenly go off piste but it’s q. interesting to hear them not being able to hide it what they’ve just read out doesn’t sense make any even – it might just be that I’m hearing them differently – really should stop listening to Radio 1 …

The whole thing about wanting a car/dishwasher/house to own is missing the point by around 1,000,000,000 miles, or is it me?. ‘Aspiration Nation’ though could just be the name of the band David Cameron was in as a teenager.

Introducing the new Underpants Tax. Designed so that the poor really will become the Great Unwashed. Thought up by someone with their pants on their head and two pencils up their nose, making unconvincing farmyard animal noises.

‘Gould and Fox-Werritty’: It sounds like a £399 jar of toff marmalade bought from a counter at Harrods, and in the small print marked ‘Contains traces of horse’. Ordered for hampers and tuckboxes at Eton.
And ETON on the river bank on crispbread with a glass of Pimms while watching the Boat Race.

“Incapacity Benefit” is NOT a benefit, it is an insurance payout, a person paid national insurance (insurance premiums) over many years to cover for such an event as becoming too ill to work. How did the word “Benefit” become associated with a persons Incapacity payment!!!.

“Will the UK and USA also go for the automatic seizure of money from accounts? My guess is they have been quietly planning on it but will now think twice about admitting to it. Preferring to keep it quiet until the next collapse when ‘circumstances call for desperate measures’ etc etc.”

“The reality is the banks are still bust – even the ones making huge profits – and when – not if – when the next bubble bursts and one bank starts to bring down another – they will all come for your money and we will all be collectively punished in order to make sure the wealthy and the powerful stay that way.”

are you talking about jim davidson the comedian? in the group of those whose relationship to comedy is like that of butter to velcro?
or do you mean jim davidson, communal bike of B wing?
(soz that was a tad Frankie Boyle, but the torygraph-reading/writing Wedges (=cuneus) have got me particularly riled of late)

things here have been less than funny, somebody I know hanged himself and he had an actual Job….

George Osborne bribes the British Army into being a partizan militia with their own privileged welfare system, a betrayal and mercenary take that would have their welfare for all world war comrades turning in their graves.

Of course the NHS budget isnt going to be cut..after all they’ve made it more possible for their rich donors to profit from it….by plundering it for themselves…however the public sector workers who work in NHS will see a pay freeze…which is a pay cut..

Other concessions to Britain’s smaller firms included in the Budget were “growth vouchers”, with the Government paying out £10m in the 2013-2014 financial year and £25m in the following 12 months to offer companies with ambitions to expand cheaper services such as legal or HR advice.

Staff will also see their tax-free loans for commuting costs double to £10,000. “The increase from the current £5,000 allowance reflects the increased costs of season tickets,” said Cormac Marum, a consultant at accountants Harwood Hutton.

A further initiative to boost staff motivation saw the Treasury confirm details of the employee shareholder status, where individuals can be given up to £2,000 shares in their firms, tax-free, and can buy up to £50,000 worth of shares, which escape capital gains tax on sale.

“This is an attractive tax break for employee shareholders,” Mr Marum added. “This may make it worthwhile to give up some of their employee rights.

“THIS MAY MAKE IT WORTHWHILE TO GIVE UP SOME OF THEIR EMPLOYEE RIGHTS”…and this comes at a time when they just sneaked through the 45 consultation period on job sackings??..
well i am sure that will encourage ppl finding work..never mind you are given worthless shares..So thats ok..

todays papers are mental with regard to the budget..you’ve got the pro budget idiots eg mail sun and express )although the sun says its comes from the ministry of truth) with a bizarre photo of osbourne as maggie , the healine reads ‘the laddies not for turning’ the times has osbourne on railway tracks , other papers are calling it the drown your sorrows budget..

salesman:: good morning how can i help you?
millionaire: good morning i’d like to buy a govt please
salesman: very good sir, what sort of govt, there are three basic types
millionaire: oh really what types are there?
salesman: well first you’ve your govt for working class (but really fond of millionaires types
millionaire: mmm not sure, what else?
salesman: next is the i dont know what the fuck they are for but will do whatever you want, depending on whats popular at the time
millionaire: hmm sounds a but undecided to me, whats next?
salesman: well lastly we have the millionaires party mostly because they are millionaires themselves
millionaire: i like the sound of them, ok i will have them then
salesman: fine i’ll get them gift wrapped for you.
milionaire: fine thank you..

What about the hundreds of billions he has been picking from the money tree called The Bank of England. He has been issuing bonds and then had the Bank of England buying between 30-40% of them to prop them up! The wonders of printing your own money from a magic tree indeed!

Oversight….
Due to the cuts, several social workers lost their jobs, and so there was nobody to notice that young Tarquin and Jemima were going off the rails. Their trust funds started vanishing up their noses. They began outdrinking some of their own doped-up gee-gees. Pretty soon (in the interests of sexual equality) Jemima was stealing posh cars to get her kicks, and Tarquin was found wandering round the park with his underpants missing and a bad case of amnesia. At some point the bailiffs were called in and there was talk of having to downsize to only three properties, the shame of it! Offshoring the funds helped them bounce back, like a ball of snot at the Bullingdon Club….

Nobody needs to worry about 2015, at that point they will be in the political wilderness where they belong. Pure and simply this coalition is not fit for purpose, it’s an abomination. I cannot see the EU lasting either, it’s on it’s last legs…. it’s doomed. The only thing we can observe is the Tories clearly in arrogant desperation making policy promises for 2015 in some insane belief by that time they will be any more viable to voters in order to continue their “Final Solution”.

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